An August 2013 report by the HHS Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation found that the number of physicians accepting new Medicare patients has stayed mostly the same throughout the past seven years. In 2012, 90.7 percent of all office-based physicians accepted new Medicare beneficiaries, up from 88 percent in 2005. In addition, the report revealed that the percentage of physicians accepting new Medicare beneficiaries is slightly higher in recent years than the percentage of those accepting new privately insured patients.
According to federal officials and the Medicare Payment Advisory Committee, the report indicates that concerns over physicians not accepting new Medicare beneficiaries because of reimbursement cuts might not be as big of a problem as some predict.
